


when the elm tree hit the church

by tajargirl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adult Sam, Angels, Bad Parenting, College Sam, Gen, Mathematics, Young Sam, the real devil was the college admissions process all along
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-04-28 08:03:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14444922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tajargirl/pseuds/tajargirl
Summary: Or; The Disillusionment of Sam Winchester.*****Sam met Castiel in a motel room in southern Idaho. He wasn’t at all like Dean had described, with the lightning and the fury and the screaming and thewings. He was wearing a trench coat, for God’s sake. When Castiel took his hand and looked him directly in the eye, Sam felt the way he had sitting on a pew, legs swinging and toes barely brushing the floor, waiting for his dad to come back. He felt the way he had in emptied-out lecture halls, just a handful of times, when faced with a completed perfect proof so elegant it felt it could not have been invented, only discovered. In the Moonlight Motel, room 126, forty-three dollars per night, Sam was reminded of hushed vaulted ceilings, of having in hand something he could never hope to contain. Sam was, for the first time since the first night Jess took off her shirt and leaned in close to him, in a state of joyful, unbridled awe.It made everything that came next so much worse.





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> _It was thirty days 'til Easter when the elm tree hit the church._   
>  _Thank God it fell on Friday 'cause at least no one was hurt._   
>  _But there was fear it might delay the second coming of the Lord,_   
>  _'Cause the stained-glass crucifixion was in stains upon the floor._

A particularly enterprising middle-school guidance counselor mentioned the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to a class of eighth-graders in November of 1996, and the following April, a federal tax return was filed on behalf of John H. Winchester for the first time since 1983. The documents reported twelve thousand dollars in income from a junkyard in South Dakota. This entitled John Winchester to a refund of three hundred and forty-seven dollars. The check was mailed to a roadhouse in Nebraska, and transferred carefully into a folder labelled HOMEWORK by a fourteen-year-old boy.

Sam was meticulous in his documentation. He spent the first twelve years of his life being left places—on a flowered motel bedspread, in the back rooms of bars run by maternal-looking women with hard faces, under the hushed vaulted ceilings of churches if the job was really dangerous. Best of all was being left in the public library. On the days he was teaching Dean but Sam was too small to come along, John would leave him a list of words to look up, enough to keep him busy until the library closed. John never looked at Sam’s notes until one day when Sam read something about Hidebehinds and walked to the Food Lion to pick up vanilla extract and garlic, then back to the motel to coat all of John’s knives in a paste. John shouted at Dean for the mess in the sink, but when he stabbed the Hidebehind it exploded into something that looked and smelled like stomach bile, and the mess in the sink didn’t seem so bad anymore. From then on John always looked at Sam’s notes, and Sam was left at the library sometimes even if he wasn’t too small to train.

The one folder John never looked in was the yellow folder labelled HOMEWORK. The yellow folder was where Sam kept his future. It accumulated years of carefully filed tax returns and refunds still in their envelopes. It had high school transcripts hurriedly printed in front offices on the days a hunt seemed to be wrapping up. It had Sam’s real Social Security card and birth certificate. Most of the contents of the folder had two copies, one each dropped off every few months at the roadhouse in Nebraska and the junkyard in South Dakota. The originals stayed in the folder behind a handful of trigonometry worksheets, and behind the originals was a glossy, well-thumbed brochure with STANFORD UNIVERSITY across the front. There was only one copy of the brochure.  

Sam kept the folder in his black backpack, under the bench seat in the back of the Impala. Once Sam got back from picking up some supplies from the gas station (wiper fluid, cigarettes, a handful of lighters, and some orange soda), and the backpack was on the floor, mouth gaping like a man punched in the gut. John had Sam’s folders spread across the kitchen table of the couple they were staying with, and Sam could see the yellow folder with some of its papers peeking out. He thought he might scream, or vomit, but John called him over and they talked about some inconsistencies he had noted in common knowledge about the Piasa Bird. Sam herded the folders back together and zipped the backpack shut. From then on the backpack stayed with him as often as possible.

The next time Sam was left at a church, he looked at the statue of Mary and he prayed for his dad and his brother. Then he looked to the hushed vaulted ceilings and prayed that John would never look in his yellow folder.

*****

Following Sam’s approximation of a junior year of high school, he looked into the SAT. Every registration deadline was a month before the test itself, and Sam didn’t know where he would be in one month. He had four years of tax returns qualifying the Winchester family for a fee waiver, but he couldn’t reach any high school guidance counselors over the summer. Sam dug in. The first of the refund checks was cashed and deposited in the bank account that he convinced Dean to open right after he turned eighteen, and which Dean promptly forgot about. Sam registered for a test date three months later in Morgantown, West Virginia. He gathered his notes and outlined for John a cycle of suspicious deaths that recurred in Morgantown every seventeen years. The last recurrence was sixteen years and nine months prior. Ten weeks later, they went to Morgantown.

Sam scored in the ninety-ninth percentile in math, and the ninety-seven in reading. He prayed that was good enough.

When Sam started his senior year, he asked his teachers for letters of recommendation. The response was sympathetic. He seemed like a good kid, and it was great that he was thinking about college. But he was so new to the school, and his attendance record was already spotty. There were just so many other students to write for. Sam nodded, and wrote his own letters of recommendation. He sent them off to ever teacher whose name he could remember, and eventually they made their way to the inboxes of admissions departments across the country. Administrators at nine different colleges would hear glowing praise of Sam Winchester, who overcame great adversity to become a pleasure to have in class.

They were in between towns when Sam bolted. It was fall, and Sam and John had been shouting themselves hoarse for almost four hundred miles. The Impala lurched into a rest stop and John got out, slamming the door. Dean stirred in the back, headphones over his ears, but didn’t wake. Sam could see John through the glass, arguing with a man standing in front of the display of maps. Something ugly welled up inside him, sharp teeth gnawing at his insides. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears, and his hands shook. He looked back. Dean was still asleep. Sam grabbed his black backpack, and was in the cab of a truck following the yellow leaves back the way he came before John made it back to the car.

What followed was the best two weeks of Sam’s life. He rented an apartment with the last refund check, and he finished all of his applications. He ate pizza with mushrooms on it. He got a dog.

Dean found Sam for John. He showed up in the apartment at three in the morning, a yellowing bruise over his jaw. He dragged Sam back to the Impala, dog barking, yellow folder still spread across the coffee table. What followed, Sam thought, would be the worst week of his life.

By the New Year, Sam was allowed out of John’s sight. FAFSA’s online application opened at midnight on the first of January. The public library opened at 8:00, and Sam hit submit at 8:47. It didn’t feel like enough. Sam knew John H. Winchester’s income would qualify him for substantial financial aid—he had chosen that income annually, after careful deliberation. Sam looked at the cost of living in major cities on both coasts, and the tiny towns blown and scattered across the long flat plains Sam had spent his life traversing seemed like specks of nothing. He was pressingly aware of the need for room and board, and increasingly aware that his own skills were not marketable.

In January of 2002, local veterans’ organizations were suddenly better-funded than they had been in decades. (They had watched the news in the motel lobby, the TV in their room drowned in static. John was muttering into the pay phone, trying to find out whether it was their kind of problem. Dean punched a wall. Sam held hands with the woman from down the hall. She was crying, and he realized as if from a distance that so was he.) The American Legion post in Lawrence, Kansas was offering scholarships to the children of wartime veterans intended to cover the costs associated with attending college. The Winchesters were on a rare pass through town, and on Saturday morning Sam interviewed in front of the members of the post. He told them about his Vietnam vet dad, who dragged him and his brother across the country because he believed in ghosts and he let them lead him. He told them about his burned-up mom, and the transcripts from nineteen high schools that he carried in a yellow folder. He looked at the wrinkled faces peering up from under WORLD WAR II VETERAN hats, and pictured Dean in the audience, listening to him drag their life into the light for everyone to see. He felt sick to his stomach. They asked him what he wanted to do with his degree.

“Law school.” He flung it out to them, begging them to grab the other end of his lifeline. “So that I can help people like my dad.”

He got the scholarship.

Sam applied to nine different schools. Three were community colleges. Three were mid-tier state schools where he thought he might be able to finagle in-state tuition. Two were decent private schools with opportunities for merit-based scholarships. One was Stanford. Sam had sat in churches for hours, days, weeks of his life, in the space and in the quiet. He sat and he studied and prayed that he could be good enough and that one day, someone, anyone would take him.

Stanford took him.

*****

On the day Sam left, he had his ducks in a row. The FAFSA paperwork came back, and between that and the American Legion scholarship, he had enough to make it on his own. He had accepted his offer and registered for orientation. He had forged the medical paperwork and bought a meal plan and applied for a dorm room. The few things he wanted to bring along were consolidated in a single duffel bag, but at the moment he told John and Dean he was leaving, he wasn’t prepared at all.

They were standing in the middle of the road outside some shitty, falling-down house that did not even contain the vampire they were looking for. He and John were screaming at each other over some fight that had resurfaced as if it had never been interrupted. There was a dead woman in her own car on the road next to them, the Impala had a flat, and while he was shouting Sam had the sudden realization that he didn’t need to be there. He stopped. John launched into the next section of his tirade, following Sam around the back of the Impala as he opened the trunk and took out his bag. He walked across the road to the dead woman’s car and put the bag in her trunk. John was demanding to know where the hell he thought he was going. Sam walked to the driver’s side and tipped the body out onto the grassy shoulder of the road. Dean was paying attention now, and John had taken a pause for breath. It was a cool night, but Sam felt warmth traveling all the way out to his fingertips, and his vision seemed clearer than it had ever been.

“I’m going to Stanford,” he said.

“ _What_?” said John.

“I accepted an offer of admission to Stanford, and I’m going right now.”

John started shouting again, and Sam turned to get in the car. He saw his brother across the roof, shaking his head back and forth.

“Sam, listen. Get away from the car. Don’t leave. Sammy, don’t leave me, okay?” He got progressively louder, and there was a look on his face Sam had never seen before. Sam might have hesitated, or he might not have. He could never remember later.

He got in the car, slammed the door, and drove away.


	2. During

Sam’s primary source of information regarding social interactions with people his own age was an unusually long yet still brief stint at a middle school in Little Rock, Arkansas. His primary source of information regarding college life was _Animal House_ , which Dean loved but did not appeal to him. In his first two weeks at Stanford, Sam was told he was stilted, awkward, overly formal, and “way too fucking focused, man, relax” (Sam would consider Brady his best friend from that moment until the day he killed him).

Still, Sam was over six feet tall, and covered in more lean muscle than most of his seventeen- to nineteen-year-old classmates would ever achieve. He was polite, he was assiduous, and he spent about sixty percent of his time staring up at the red-roofed buildings and grinning from ear to ear. He had a bevy of odd tics and personal rituals and symptoms of hypervigilance, but college wasn’t the lawless and tribalistic hellscape he remembered from his time as a lanky twelve-year-old. The nerdy graphic tee crowd left his Army-surplus-clad self alone until his stellar qualities as a lab partner became public knowledge. Viraj kept sweeping the ash and salt from their shared windowsill into the dustbin, but when Sam’s supply ran out he let the bag sit empty. He kept his knives tucked carefully away.

The third week Sam spent at Stanford heralded Majors Night. Sam had a vision of himself studying law. In the vision, he would blow away his newfound peers with his ability to process and retain information, the way he made connections between sources, and that spark of genius that held his arguments together. He would be proud, but humble, hardworking but easygoing. He would be grounded by the fact that none of it was life or death.

On Majors Night, Sam ran headlong into the brick wall of a fact that Stanford did not actually offer an undergraduate law degree. He wandered rudderless, passing by lecture halls and offices filled with strangers. He threaded between columns and sailed under arches and traversed long tiled hallways. On one pass a girl with a posterboard called him over.

“Hey man, you wanna see something cool? I promise it’s cool.” The posterboard had an insignia on it, like a red figure eight twisted around and through itself.

“Okay,” said Sam. “As long as it’s cool.”

“All right! So, I’m Seraphina, and I’m a first-year grad student presenting my undergraduate thesis for incoming students who might be interested in the math major. Does that seem like something you might be interested in?”

“Sure.”

“Great! Well, I would highly recommend it, I had a fantastic time in the department. Anyway, I did my thesis in Ramsey theory, which basically asks how big a mathematical structure has to be in order to guarantee certain properties will hold. There’s a lot of theory, but there’s more applied stuff too if you wanna go that route—it’s very choose-your-own-adventure.” There was an expectant pause.

“Uh, I like . . . theory.”

“Awesome! Then let me show you the cool thing.” She beckoned him closer to the poster. In the center was a small box surrounded by blocks of text and mathematical notation. Inside the box was written:

_g 64_.

“That’s Graham’s number.”

“Neat,” said Sam.

“Yeah, it is neat. Graham’s number is an upper bound of the solution to a problem in Ramsey theory, and it is literally unknowably big.”

Sam looked back at the little _g 64_ on the poster. “Okay,” he said, “like infinity?”

“No,” said Seraphina, “not at all like infinity. Graham’s number is finite, and it has a specific value. It is just literally too big for us to never know what it is. We can’t even know how many digits long it is. If you tried to store the amount of information contained in Graham’s number in your brain, it would collapse into a black hole.” Seraphina grinned, her teeth gleaming. Sam looked down at the poster, and back up at her.

“Do we, like. Do we know anything about it?”

“Sure,” said Seraphina. “We won’t ever know what it starts with, but we know it ends in a seven. Plus, think about it. When faced with the infinite, isn’t proof of existence worth something?”

There in the tiled hallway, Sam’s breath caught in his throat. He thought of hushed vaulted ceilings, and of reaching out, fingertips just brushing the hem of something he could never understand. He thanked Seraphina and headed back out into the sunlight.

The next Monday, he declared a major in math.

*****

Some of Sam’s classmates from lab threw a Halloween party. Sam claimed food poisoning and locked himself in his room all night, knives at hand for the first time since he arrived.

For Thanksgiving, Sam hitched a ride to Los Angeles and spent the break standing on the Santa Monica pier, staring into the water. He saw the stars on the Walk of Fame and at Griffin Planetarium, where he kept his ticket stub. He stayed far away from the desert.

Sam finished the semester with a 4.0 and spent the winter holidays doing scut work in a reasonably prestigious lab. It was quiet on campus and still warm. On New Year’s Eve he tried to go to a bar and remembered he had tossed all of his fakes in a fit of upstanding citizenship back in September. He went back to his dorm and watched the ball drop on the TV in the empty common room, beer in hand.

When campus started to come alive again, Sam was surprised to see familiar faces around every corner. People would nod at him, or grin, and a girl from his art history class always waved. Sam did the math in his head, and realized that in March he would have officially lived at Stanford longer than he had ever lived anywhere else.

For spring break, Brady invited Sam and a group of other guys to come to South Padre Island. It was Sam’s first time on an airplane, and the first time he spent a night away from campus unarmed. He got a new fake of abysmal quality, and ended up dislocating some guy’s elbow in a bar fight, but the police agreed he had it coming and Tim, who did not like Sam, patted him on the back and told him it was awesome.

Sam finished out the year. He still had a 4.0, and he sublet an apartment for the summer with a guy he played rec soccer with. He worked temp jobs and got a tan and stopped phoning in to check the answering machine that sat somewhere in Minnesota and held the voicemail he had left there on Christmas morning and nothing else.

In the fall, Sam met Jessica Moore, and was desperately grateful she hadn’t known him as a freshman. He and Brady and some of their other friends had moved into small group housing, and she was a friend of a friend whom Brady had invited to a party celebrating the start of sophomore year. She had wild blonde hair that fell just past her shoulders and lipstick that matched her STANFORD VOLLEYBALL t-shirt, and she was holding a can of Coca-Cola with a lime jammed in the top. In the next ten minutes, Sam found out she was a junior, she was a libero on the volleyball team, and she didn’t drink within forty-eight hours of a match. She left by eleven, and the next afternoon, Sam went to his first-ever volleyball game. The Tuesday after they went out for coffee, and Sam didn’t miss a home game for the rest of the year.

Sam spent the first month of the next summer helping Jess study for the MCAT, and the rest back at the reasonably prestigious lab, this time with more than scut work to do. In the fall, he and Brady got their own apartment, and Sam bought real plates and silverware and a blender.

Sam spent Thanksgiving of his junior with Jess’ family, and when they were leaving her mom hugged him and told him they would be excited to have him back. For the next two weeks, Sam and Jess had the biggest fight of their relationship, about trust and reciprocity and why Sam never, ever talked about his family. Jess knew that his mom was dead, and that he moved around a lot. Sam knew Jess’ family was the most important thing in her world. Sam didn’t want to be defined by his past, and Jess didn’t want to give herself over to someone who wouldn’t give in return. It took them two weeks to figure this out, but they didn’t break up. Sam couldn’t fill in the broad strokes of his life, but the details mattered too. He told her his dad made him stay inside on Halloween with the door locked. He told her he never listens to classic rock because it reminds him too much of his brother. Under the blankets one night, he told her he went to the park once as a teenager and saw a little boy, smiling, eviscerate an old man who had stopped to help him find his way home. She let him talk, and only asked questions that he could answer. They went back to Jess’ house for Christmas.

In the spring Jess was accepted into four different medical schools. One was Stanford. Sam still wanted to go to law school, and with Jess starting a four-year med program the year before he started a three-year law program, they would finish together. Sam thought she should go to the best school she could get into, regardless of what she thought he could manage. Jess thought she should go to the best school she could get into, and had absolute faith that that he could get into Stanford Law. Before the summer began, they signed a twelve-month lease together.

Jess started classes, and Sam started a thesis that followed on from his summer research. He prepared for the LSAT in a normal, non-obsessive way. In the evenings Jess would come in the door and dump her bookbag on the floor, and he would put away his study guide for the day, and they would make dinner.

“You are so out of my league,” he murmured one night, and she laughed and hip-checked him into the counter without looking up from the dishes.

Sam got a 174. History would forget the rest, but it would remember, somehow, that he got a 174. The results came back on the Halloween that was the last day of Sam’s life. He brought Jess lunch, and she convinced him to take a break that night. Celebrate. Their friends were there, and so was Tim, and there was beer, and he had her red lipstick on his cheek. When he turned out the lights and fell asleep to the sound of her breathing, it was with a tiny, incandescent bubble of happiness in his chest.

*****

There was someone in their apartment. Sam woke up with blue light filtering through the windows. It was three in the morning. He moved slowly, controlling his breathing and wishing he hadn’t put all of his weapons in storage. He saw a figure silhouetted, paused in a blind corner, then made his move. As he was thrown on his back it occurred to him that he was out of practice.

Suddenly it was Dean there, smiling that Dean smile down at him. He looked older. He looked smaller. Jess was there too, and when Dean called her out of his league she didn’t even smile. Dean was being unconscionably rude, and Sam realized these two people were actually meeting. Dean was talking about John, and Sam felt like everything was going far too fast, like he was barely clinging to the surface of the planet. He couldn’t stop thinking about a younger Dean, another apartment at three in the morning. The Impala was outside, and he didn’t want to go. He argued with Dean, and he argued with himself, and in the end, he went. It was the one thing he would never forgive himself, the going.

He made Dean promise to have him back by Monday.

He packed a bag of his old hunting clothes and promised himself he would drop them by Goodwill on the way home. He left everything else in the apartment, except the engagement ring, which he kept in his pocket.

He didn’t say a proper goodbye to Jess.

*****

His whole life burned.


	3. After

Sam started again under the red and blue police lights. He started again, but this time, his life wasn’t his—his body wasn’t his, and his mind wasn’t his, and the car wasn’t his, and the music wasn’t his and the clothes didn’t fit right and everything was too long and too flat and too open. He saw things that hadn’t happened yet, which was particularly distressing given the fact that the future wasn’t something he wanted to consider. It was too long, and too flat, and too open.

They found John, and they lost him. They found John, and he died. They didn’t talk about it.

Sam met a girl, and she was a demon.

Sam met a girl, and she was a werewolf.

Sam met a girl, and then he left, and he never saw her again but six years later she would be brutally murdered to make a particularly emphatic point.

Sam met a girl, and he couldn’t bother to be surprised she was a demon.

John had told Dean to either save Sam or kill him, and Sam was having trouble differentiating between the two. A lot of people wanted to kill Sam, but only one actually succeeded. Dean couldn’t let it go, though, never had been able to resist showing up in whatever darkened room Sam was resting in and drag him back out by the ear, consequences be damned. It didn’t seem fair to let Dean go in his place, so they spent a full year running around the country like headless, heavily armed chickens. The FBI did not appreciate their efforts; there were widely disseminated news stories about it.

Sam wondered sometimes what Brady and Tim and Jess’ mom thought, the rest of his friends, his advisors. He wondered if they believed the news, imagined them talking about it over beers, all concerned. They didn’t seem at all like real people anymore.

They burned every bridge, but at the end of it Dean died anyway. It was ugly and horrible and there was no way back. Sam was alone with his twisting stomach and the feeling there was something awful inside of him.

*****

Something brought Dean back.

*****

Sam met Castiel in a motel room in southern Idaho. He wasn’t at all like Dean had described, with the lightning and the fury and the screaming and the _wings_. He was wearing a trench coat, for God’s sake, a phrase Sam regretted even as it curled through his mind. When Castiel took his hand and looked him directly in the eye (they were blue, his eyes were blue), Sam felt the way he had sitting on a pew, legs swinging and toes barely brushing the floor, waiting for his dad to come back. He felt the way he had in emptied-out lecture halls, just a handful of times, when faced with a completed perfect proof so elegant it felt it could not have been invented, only discovered. In the Moonlight Motel, room 126, forty-three dollars per night, Sam was reminded of hushed vaulted ceilings, of having in hand something he could never hope to contain. Sam was, for the first time since the first night Jess took off her shirt and leaned in close to him, in a state of joyful, unbridled awe.

It made everything that came next so much worse.

“The boy with the demon blood,” Castiel said. He was speaking to Sam but had already dismissed him in favor of announcing his plan to smite one thousand two hundred and fourteen people. Dean was talking back like he never had to John, all forced casualness and false bravado, bargaining for a thousand lives.

“You’re supposed to show mercy,” Sam said, and immediately wanted to take it back. It felt childish and small and the conversation continued right over it.

They saved lives, in the end. They got back in their car and drove away. The next time he was on his own, Ruby was there, and for the first time in his life Sam did something because he thought God would disapprove. It was a mistake.

In his past life, Sam made mistakes, on tests and with money and while painting the bedroom and by spilling coffee all over one of Jess’ anatomy textbooks. She used to laugh at him and toss her hair over her shoulder and tell him it wasn’t the end of the world.

This time, of course, it was.

*****

There was no instruction manual for the apocalypse. When a being of unknowable celestial power with a fledgling conscience calls you the vessel of Satan, declares himself under the righteous command of your GED-holding older brother, and insists on riding around in your dead dad’s Chevy, you have to figure it out on your own. In retrospect, Sam would have probably made some different choices. Not listening to the demon bitch, for one. Fool Sam twice, shame on him. Not using demon blood like it’s the 5-hour Energy shots he lived off of for three months in college.

Not leaving Jess all alone in the middle of the night.

Telling Dean he loved him before he drove away.

Hindsight. It’s 20/20.

Sam was having trouble seeing the present so clearly. It was different, before, when Sam felt like the walking dead but could conceptualize the number of lives at stake. One thousand two hundred and fourteen had been daunting, but conceivable. Sam had met more than one thousand two hundred and fourteen people, lived more than one thousand two hundred and fourteen days. Billions of people, the whole of the species, was inconceivable. It was too many people to imagine, much less feel empathy for, connection with, a sense of responsibility towards.

Sam did his best. It seemed the thing to do, given that he had already managed to jumpstart the literal, biblical apocalypse. He had never imagined that was something he could do, so that fact he couldn’t imagine he could undo it seemed irrelevant.

Somewhere in the middle of the Great American Road Trip of Salvation or Damnation, Sam got used to Castiel. Castiel, in fact, became Cas, who hummed tunelessly to songs only he could hear and sometimes deigned to pump gas if Sam and Dean both needed to use the bathroom. The electric pulse of excitement Sam felt in his presence dulled to a constant hum, interrupted by spikes of wonderment when Cas made casual statements that would throw the entirety of the world’s priesthood into paroxysms of debate.

*****

So there they were, at the end of the world. Dean was off posing as a genealogist for a staggeringly beautiful woman who happened to have the exact piece of information they needed to locate the grave of the person whose headstone held the next piece of information required on their endless scavenger hunt. Sam and Cas were having lunch.

“You majored in math,” said Cas. Yellow foam gaped from the shitty vinyl bench where the angel sat, eating a shitty turkey reuben. Dean was making him practice having normal conversations.

“What?” asked Sam.

“When you were a college student. Your field of study was mathematics.” Cas was making eye contact with the googly-eyed being on the label of the ketchup bottle.

“Did Dean mention that?” Sam didn’t think Dean had _known_ that. Cas cut his eyes to Sam’s, then up and to the left, dismissive. Leave it to Dean to teach an angel how to roll his eyes. Across the diner, the waitress’ tray came unbalanced, pulling her to the left and out of Sam’s sight. He didn’t hear a crash. Sam put his fork down and cleared his throat.

“You know, we used to talk about something called Graham’s number. It’s the upper bound of the solution to this problem in graph theory, and it’s finite, but it’s literally unknowably large. Like, if you tried to shove the amount of information it contains into a human brain, you’d get a black hole. Graham’s number wouldn’t fit in the observable universe. We can’t know what it starts with, even though we know it ends in a seven. But it’s still, like, practically useful, in some ways. I mean, if you’re a mathematician.” _It reminds me of you_ , he didn’t say.

“Four,” said Cas. He was looking out the window at a shitty gray sedan rolling along the cracked asphalt.

“What?” asked Sam.

“Graham’s number starts with a four.” His gaze was back on Sam’s face, sharp. “Four three eight nine two three, and so on.” He turned back to the window, where outside a little girl was hanging off her mother’s arm.

“Oh,” said Sam. He looked back down at his plate. That afternoon he would finish his food. He would text his brother, pay the check, and tip the waitress. Then he would walk out into the world the way he always did: knowing more, and feeling less.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of faith, mysticism, and awe tied up in the history of mathematics. That is where this began. But I found that making Sam a math nerd raises some questions, like, how on earth did that boy even make it to Stanford? I tried to guess.
> 
> Title is from Danny Schmidt's "Stained Glass."
> 
> I am [on tumblr](http://tajargirl.tumblr.com/).


End file.
